We have been watching this rain approach via computer models.
We shopped for groceries. Made sure we had enough purified water. Froze two gallon-sized water jugs to later be placed in the fridge if we lost power. And cancelled a Game Night we were planning to host on our open air terrace.
And today it arrived. Although tomorrow it’s supposed to be worse.
We lost power last night around 2 am. It’s still off. And was off most of yesterday morning.
I sit outside on my covered front porch writing this at 5:38 pm by what little natural light is left. And have use of this phone to write and post now only because I’d thought to add data to my phone and had fully pre-charged my phone’s backup power pack.
A year ago Tropical Storm Nate struck, with the loss of lives, homes and boats.
Then our house flooded, water pouring in from both the back and the front and from underneath the windows; entering under our sliding glass door in the front and from the seam where the vertical wall meets the tiled floor in the back.
In response, we removed the front door, had it sealed and reinstalled. We replaced the fabric awning over it with a sturdier wooden and tiled porch roof. We had a trench dug around the back of the house and had the exterior concrete wall resealed. We added silicon to the windows, put flashing above them and angled the exterior window ledges sloping down.
And yet, John woke me with the same words this year as last: “We’ve got water coming in!”
But it wasn’t as bad.
And only from the same spot in the back where the wall meets the floor tiles in our laundry room.
We mopped and laid down towels. And said a few cuss words below our breath.
But then John went out, topless and in shorts, into the pouring rain, armed only with a stick and cleared the blocked channel of our exterior drainage ditch.
The water stopped entering. But without electricity to use the dryer or our fans or our A/C for that matter, and with the air soaked in super-saturated humidity, our flood-drenched towels are still dripping with water and forming puddles on the floor.
Tonight we’ll fall asleep to what’s left of the power in my battery-operated fan.
And we’ll see what tomorrow’s prediction of double the rainfall actually brings.
